By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a plan to bail out Greece to the tune of $41 billion is now being formulated by Germany and France. It might seem as if a bailout is inevitable and that the terms of such a bailout are the only things now […]
Read more...By Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge, editor of The Richebacher Letter, and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute The question of fiscal sustainability looms large at the moment – not just in the peripheral nations of the eurozone, but also in the UK, the US, and Japan. More restrictive fiscal […]
Read more...Consider: if we are starting to see signs of resistance to austerity measures in the US, it would suggest that they are not going to go over too well in other countries that have debt overhangs either. Defaults and/or restructurings are usually more palatable, politically. And before suggesting that bondholders won’t stand for it, guess […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal is not the first to comment on the magnitude of the wagers against the euro (the Financial Times took note nearly two weeks ago: “Speculators raise record bets against euro“). But the Journal offers a spectacle sure to inflame sentiment in Europe: that of major hedge funds feasting first on lemon-roasted […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. Usually, we dread the regular Congressional testimonies of the Fed Chairman. They generally constitute a mix of obfuscation on the part of Mr. Bernanke mixed with political grandstanding on the part of Congress. But occasionally, a glimmer of truth comes […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist and L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City In recent weeks there has been much discussion about what to do about Greece. These questions become all the more relevant as the country attempts to float a multibillion-euro bond issue later […]
Read more...Several readers pointed to a recent post by Michael Pettis, which mainly discussed how expected wage increases in China are a hopeful sign that China is taking steps to become more consumption-oriented. But as much as this is a move forward, changing the mix of China’s composition of demand is at least a decade-long project […]
Read more...A fair number of policy commentators are hewing to the view that somehow the EU will cobble together some sort of solution to the Greek fiscal mess because the alternatives look vasty worse. As Paul Krugman noted: Now what? A breakup of the euro is very nearly unthinkable, as a sheer matter of practicality. As […]
Read more...By L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who also writes for New Deal 2.0 Whenever a demagogue wants to whip up hysteria about federal budget deficits, he or she invariably begins with an analogy to a household’s budget: “No household can continually spend more than its income, and […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment strategist who writes for New Deal 2.0. If nothing else, it’s clear (as one wag wrote this morning) that the state of Obama’s rhetoric is strong. The President almost always gives a good speech, but it’s the follow-through that is generally problematic. And the speech itself sends […]
Read more...By Stephanie Kelton, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Missouri-Kansas City My colleague and fellow blogger, Randy Wray, has just argued that President Obama should scrap the speech he’s planning to deliver tonight and surprise the American people with something entirely different. I couldn’t agree more. And while I agree that job creation must be […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns As I indicated in my post Grading Obama’s economic policy after one year, I see the President as a triangulating center-left politician of the Bill Clinton variety. The reason we have seen public policy which has been favorable to big business and reactive to events on the ground during this […]
Read more...By Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney and author of Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences The US Senate should not reappoint Ben Bernanke. As Obama’s reaction to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s old seat showed, real change in policy only occurs after political […]
Read more...Before you dismiss the headline as nutty, at least one respected macroeconomist and former central banker, and now chief economist of Citigroup is of the view that England is at risk of a currency crisis. He noted last November: With the pound sterling dropping like a stone against most other currencies and credit default swap […]
Read more...By Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since then, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. A week ago, in Atlanta, Bernanke responded to his critics, including John Taylor of Taylor Rule fame (the Taylor […]
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